Page 48 of A Slow Fire Burning

“We’ll take her down to hear the formal charge now,” he said.

“No, please,” Laura said again. She held out her hands to Egg. She wanted to beg him, she wanted to fling herself at his feet, to offer herself to him, but there were other people in the room now, people in uniforms, someone helping her out of her chair. They were gentle enough but the gentleness made it worse; she started to push them away, started to fight.

“Laura.” She could hear Egg’s voice, concerned, reprimanding. “Laura, come on, don’t do this.” But she wanted to do this, she wanted to fight, she wanted them to grab her, to throw her to the ground, to knock her out. She wanted oblivion.

THIRTY

Carla had changed her outfit twice, she had started and abandoned the letter she was writing to Theo three times, and finally, on the fourth draft, she thought she’d got it right. Instead of just doing a flit, she’d decided that she would go round to his for dinner after all, she would stay the night, as she usually did, and in the morning she’d slip away, leaving the letter on his desk.

She had a car booked to take her to Kings Cross station at eleven thirty the following morning, allowing ample time for her to retrieve from Hayward’s Place the things that she had stupidly taken across and left there—the dog’s lead, the letters, and the notebook—things she could not bear for Theo to find. She didn’t want him to have to face reality as she did; he didn’t have her constitution. And look, after all, what it had done to her.

What a pity that Daniel wasn’t doing a bit more with his talents! That was what Carla was thinking on the day that she took thenotebook from the boat, as she paged through it, sitting on her sofa at home. He drew so beautifully, rendered facial expression so vividly. He captured movement, he registered nuance, he was empathetic on the page in a way he never seemed to achieve in real life.

She felt guilty for thinking this, guilty for looking at the notebooks at all—Daniel had always been clear that they weren’t for other eyes, that he drew for himself. A confidence issue, Carla had assumed, although now she wasn’t so sure. She felt distinctly uneasy as she dwelled on the pages on which her own image appeared, because she knew for sure now something that she’d only suspected in the past, that there was something wrong with the way Daniel loved her. Worse, she was afraid that the way she loved him was somehow wrong too. She felt all these things—guilt and unease and fear—and yet she couldn’t stop turning the pages, because what he had drawn was beautiful.

It was idealized, all of it. The house on Lonsdale Square, where she and Angela had grown up and where Daniel had spent his early childhood, was now more castle than Victorian villa, the grounds more park than London garden. Daniel as a young man was broader of shoulder, more heavily muscled, and when she saw Ben, the breath caught in her chest. A dimpled cherub, doe-eyed perfection: Daniel had captured perfectly the generosity of his little smile, the soft curl of his hair at the nape of his neck; it almost stopped her heart.

She put the book down.

When she picked it up again, as she skipped back and forth through the pages, trying to make sense of where on earth this story was going, she realized that noteverythingwas idealized. Angela, for example, was cruelly depicted, scrawny and scantily clad, a lush, a fall-down drunk. But Daniel, too, suffered in the telling. InAres, although he was physically beautiful, his character was rotten: hewas malicious, he persecuted younger boys at school, occasionally incurring retaliatory beatings, he seduced and discarded young girls, who seemed to appear somewhere on the scale from naive to idiotic, he bullied and humiliated his mother. It was just so bizarre, Carla thought, so unnerving and yet so affecting to see Daniel depicted as monstrous, and to know he had drawn himself this way. What did it mean that instead of making himself the hero of his own story, he had made himself the villain? It cut her to the bone. But as she turned the pages, that bloody bloc of pain sitting just beneath her breastbone began to shift, to dissolve, and was replaced by a feeling of dread, a creeping certainty that she should put the book down, that she should close it and not look at it ever again. But then, around halfway through, she came across herself once more, arriving at Lonsdale Square on a sunny afternoon with Ben in her arms, and she knew immediately what day it was, and she could not look away.

In Daniel’s version of events, Carla is wearing a dress, her hair is long and wavy, falling over bare shoulders, Ben—gorgeous, golden Ben—is smiling and laughing, perched on her hip. From the balcony, Daniel, his pinched face half in darkness, watches as Carla hands Ben over to Angela. Leaning out into the sunlight, over the balcony, Daniel calls and waves to his aunt but she has already turned away, without acknowledging him. His little face falls.

Over the page, night has fallen. Daniel is watching television in the playroom, alone. He gets up and goes upstairs to his mother’s bedroom to look for her, to say good night, but she is not there. So he goes back down to his own room, where he finds that his little cousin has woken up, has climbed off the mattress on which he was sleeping and is now lying in the middle of the floor. He is drawing, scribbling in a book, surrounded by similar books strewn all aroundhim, their pages covered in his ugly scrawl. The anguish on Daniel’s face is vividly drawn: Ben has ruined all of his books, his carefully drawn comic books! Distraught, he calls for his mother, but no one comes. He looks for her, searching room to room until, eventually, he arrives at the study. The door is shut, but he can hear someone inside, making a noise. Carefully, he pushes the door open, and there she is, straddling a man, some stranger, some man he’s never seen before. Her head is thrown back, her red-lipped mouth open wide. She turns, she catches sight of her horrified child and starts to laugh.

Daniel flees the room.

The next scene shows Daniel lying in bed, his imagination a cloud above him in which various scenes play out: in one, he imagines himself hitting his mother’s lover on the head with a champagne bottle; in another, he slaps his mother’s drunken face. Then, the cloud of his imagination dissipates. Daniel props himself up on one elbow and gazes across the room at the little boy, asleep on his side, his long lashes grazing his cheekbones, his head haloed with curls.

In the morning, Daniel goes upstairs to his mother’s room. She is asleep, alone. He leaves her, closing her bedroom door behind him. He returns to the second floor, to his own bedroom where he gently shakes the little boy awake. The child, delighted to see his big cousin, smiles a huge, goofy smile. Daniel helps him from the bed, he takes his hand, he leads him to the study, opens the door. The pair of them cross the room, hand in hand, picking their way through the evidence of last night’s debauchery—clothes strewn around, ashtray overflowing, an empty bottle of champagne lying on its side. Daniel leads the child to the balcony, he opens the doors, and from behind his back he produces a toy—a bright red truck. He offers it to the child,who laughs delightedly, reaching out to grab it, and as he does, Daniel rolls the truck carefully out onto the balcony, toward the broken railing. He watches as the child toddles after it.

In the final panel, Daniel is alone again, sitting on the edge of the balcony, with his feet dangling over the edge, a smile on his lips.

THIRTY-ONE

Irene sat perched on an uncomfortably hard chair in Theo Myerson’s living room. She could tell, before she sat down, that the chair was not going to be comfortable, but she sat in it anyway, because it was relatively high and she calculated that she’d be able to get out of it without help, which was important. She had no desire to be at Myerson’s mercy. With some difficulty, one hand gripping the chair and the other holding her handbag tightly to her lap, she managed to scoot the chair a few inches closer to the wood burner in the grate. It was fearfully cold; winter had returned, with some vengeance. On the radio that morning they’d talked about snow.

Myerson was in the kitchen, fetching her a sherry. She didn’t want one—she’d never been much of a drinker—but when he offered, after only grudgingly inviting her in in the first place, she’d thought it best to accept. He was drinking wine. Alone, in the middle of the afternoon.

While he was gone, Irene admired his bookshelves. Say what you like about Theo Myerson, he had beautiful bookshelves. Oak, Irenethought, and probably custom built, running from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, with one of those nifty rolling ladders to allow you access to the very top shelves. From where she was sitting, she couldn’t read the names on the spines, which was frustrating. Irene liked few things more than a good nose through other people’s bookshelves, although now was clearly not the time.

“Carla should be along any minute,” Theo said when he came back into the room. He handed her a small crystal glass. “She’s coming for dinner.”

Irene accepted the drink with a nod. “I didn’t know where she lived,” she said, vaguely aware that she’d already explained that to him. “But I found your address, as I said, on an envelope in a book.”

Theo nodded. He sank down into an armchair quite some distance across the room. He took a large gulp of wine and glowered at her. “You need to speak to her urgently? Can you tell me what it’s about?”

“I think it’s best we wait for Carla,” Irene said. She sipped her sherry. Theo raised his eyes briefly to the heavens, before glowering at her once more. He was not a subtle man. They sat in silence for a few moments and then, cracking under the pressure, Irene said, “I just need to speak to her about something I found in Angela’s house.” She took another sip of the sherry. “A notebook I found, one of Daniel’s.” She took it from her handbag and held it up briefly before thinking better of it and slipping it back into the bag.

“And this is urgent, is it?” Myerson said, his voice flat.

“Well, I... You haven’t seen it before, have you, Mr. Myerson?” Theo shook his head, thankfully uninterested. He shifted in his seat, patently irritated; he seemed on the point of asking her to leave. Nervously, she took another sip. “It’s what you’d call a graphic novel, I suppose. There was one on the Booker list, wasn’t there, not so long ago? Very odd, I thought—I mean, how on earth do you compare acomic with a real book?” Theo raised his eyebrows. He glugged his wine. He was starting to make her very uncomfortable. “Well, no accounting for taste, I suppose.” She fell silent a moment. “I found this in one of your books,” she said, holding up the envelope with his address on it. “The crime one.”

In the long, tense silence that followed, Irene pondered the wisdom of bringing up the manuscript she’d read, the one that Laura had given her. But then, now was perhaps not the best time to accuse Myerson of plagiarism. She wouldn’t want to get distracted from the matter at hand. She once more raised her glass to her lips and was surprised to find that there was little more than a drop remaining.

“This notebook,” Theo said eventually, frowning at her, “you said you found it in Angela’s house. What were you doing in Angela’s house?”

“Well, you see, the thing is...”

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